From Silents to Sound

1. From Silents to Sound Music in Film May term 2004

2. Introduction • Claudia Gorbman traces the development of film music from its use in silent film through the development of the classical Hollywood film score.

3. Four arguments that explain the inclusion of music in the film genre • Historical • Pragmatic • Aesthetic • Psychological and anthropological

4. The Historical Argument • Association with melodrama • Physical context of early cinema • Music in other dramatic arts • The subject matter of film

5. The pragmatic argument • Music drowned out the clatter of film machinery • Music was used on set during filming to help get the actors and actresses into character and to help them ignore the activity around them.

6. The Aesthetic Argument • Music compensated for the lack of speech • Music restored a sense of spatial depth • Music provided rhythm that interacted with the pace of visual movement • Music helped to imbue the “dead” images with some of the life they lost in the process of mechanical reproduction

7. The Psychological and Anthropological Argument • Music mediates against the ghostly nature of cinema • Music permitted a deeper psychic investment in the world of silent film • Music evoked the collective community • Music bound the audience together into a community of listener-participants

8. Some General Considerations • The power to represent the human voice revolutionized cinema • The recorded human voice fleshed out the human body on screen • The recorded voice endowed the body with a “surplus of reality”

9. Sound in Film develops • 1926: Don Juan, first feature-length Vitaphone film—recorded musical soundtrack; no synchronous sound or dialogue • 1927: The Jazz Singer included both a recorded musical soundtrack and synchronous sound • 1927-30: part- and all-talkies are made while the industry invests huge $ in developing sound technology

10. Sound Technology • Before 1929-30 all sound was direct, which required the actors to stay close to the microphone and limited the spatial dimensions that sound would later add, and because the camera had to stay in a booth, it limited photographic possibilities as well • Sound tech didn’t yet allow soundtrack editing • 1931: background music during a talkie appears • 1932: separate tracks for speech, music & effects are used • 1933-34: fully diegetic sound film comes to stay, and with it a system of conventions is developed that becomes the backbone for the Classical Hollywood film score approach